Quite often, it seems like we’ve got more pans in the fire than one could possibly keep track of, but they all feel “right” if you know what I mean… As we work on projects in various areas of kiting, there always seem to be more ways we can get involved in growing and promoting kiting using the tools we have at our disposal.
Revolution Tutorial Videos
One of the most exciting new projects here at Kitelife is the new series of Rev tutorial videos we’ve started releasing… While some of these will be exclusively available in our official subscribers area, the grand plan is to make 10-12 of the most fundamental tutorials (the stuff everyone needs to know for pain-free Rev flying) available free of charge via YouTube.
We’ve already finished and posted five tutorials, three of which can be found on our YouTube channel or at our LearnKites.com website… Already, we have 25 more tutorials formulated, ready for filming and editing in the very near future.
In an amazing show of support, we’ve also recruited volunteers from all over the world to provide subtitle translations for every video… At the moment, we have as many as NINE languages available for some of the tutorials with a grand total of FOURTEEN languages actually being worked on as we speak, all of which will be available with a couple of clicks via YouTube or as a supplemental file in our downloads area.
In just about 5 weeks, our Line Management tutorial has already seen over 2,500 viewings worldwide and the other two YouTube videos have been viewed over 1,600 times each… A long time problem for many Rev fliers, keeping your lines tangle free doesn’t have to be difficult, and while there may be many ways to wind and unwind lines, the method we outline is 100% bulletproof and allows you to set up in just about 3 minutes, same for packing up at the end of the day.
Thanks to generous support from some of our most loyal subscribers, we’ve also been able to obtain some new video equipment and will be working on additional tutorials over the coming couple of months as time and weather allow.
Line Management
Subtitles: English, Japanese, German, Lithuanian, French, Chinese,
Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese
Assembly & Disassembly
Subtitles: English, Japanese, German, Lithuanian, French, Dutch,
Spanish, Portuguese
Flat Relaunching
Subtitles: English, Japanese, German, Chinese, Lithuanian
Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, French
Also finished are 3D (catch and throw) as well as Light Wind Flying, and these bonus tutorials can be found in both HD (1280×720) and iPod/iPhone (480×272) formats in the Kitelife Downloads area along with the other three tutorials… For a modest subscription fee, our subscribers have full access to these files along with all of the available subtitle files to go with them.
New video from LC indoor
We just finished up at the Lincoln City Indoor Festival this past weekend here in Oregon where Aerial Experience and the Lincoln City Visitor & Convention Bureau (LC VCB) joined forces yet again to put on a full one hour indoor kite show, the only one of it’s kind in the USA… We were able to take some pretty good video while we were there and with blessings from the LC VCB, they are now available for download in the 2010 section of our subscribers area.
Restoring our full archive
Since having to rebuild our entire web site in 2008 due to hacker attacks, we’ve taken significant steps to make our site more secure but are still in the ongoing process of restoring our oldest issues to the archive… It’s progressing nicely as we use the opportunity for my wife Takako to learn the ropes of working with web pages, but slowing the process is the fact that we’re now working with the original issues produced by Mike Gillard between 1998 and 2002 which were all created using MS FrontPage and require additional code stripping (“cleaning”) and reformatting to be compatible with our new format.
We hope to have at least 2-3 more past issues restored to the archive over the next month or two, our ideal goal when time allows is to release at least one issue between each of our new issues, putting one issue online each month, alternating between old and new…. At the moment, issues 25 (Winter 2002) to 71 (current) can be found online in our full archive.
Upcoming events on our schedule for April and June
As always, we have a full slate of events on our travel schedule for 2010 and we’re greatly looking forward to reconnecting with (or meeting) many of you at some of these events over the next two months:
Maryland International Kite Exposition **
April 23-25, 2010 | Ocean City, MDNorthwest Winds Rev Clinic
May 8-9, 2010 | Lincoln City, ORGreat Lakes Kite Festival **
May 22-23, 2010 | Grand Haven, MIRockaway Beach Kite Festival
May 15-16, 2010 | Rockaway Beach, ORKites Over Grinnell **
June 5-6, 2010 | Grinnell, IASaint-Honoré dans l’vent **
June 18-20 | Saint-Honoré, Quebec CanadaLincoln City Summer Festival **
June 26-27, 2010 | Lincoln City, OR
** = Team iQuad will be in attendance!
World Sport Kite Championships
Still going strong, the WSKC is scheduled for April 10-18 in Berck sur Mer, France… With nine teams scheduled to represent from six countries, this may be one of the smallest WSKC events we’ve seen, but it promises to be a real “clash of the titans” with some very good entries this year.
Coming in as a bit of a dark horse this year is the new Red Bull Kite Force team… The four remaining members of the Red Bull Kite Performer group (past articles 1/2/3) that was assembled in 2007-2008, this team is made up of Yasu Numata (former leader of 2001 and 2002 world champion team Overdrive), Richard Debray and Mathieu Mayet (arguably two of the best dual line pilots in the world), as well as veteran Ramlal Tien (affectionately called “mama” by his teammates) who owns l’Atelier, producer of high end sport kites for many years including the Masque.
Also very active with pre-game “psyche-outs” is the Scratch Bunnies team led by Carl Robertshaw (formerly of 1995 world champion team AirKraft) and another all-star assortment of pilots including brother James Robertshaw, Chris Goff (the “Petite Phenom”), Dave Morley, Sasha Reading, along with team veterans Robin Smith and Richard Pellew.
While these may be the two most vocal teams with what appears to be an intense, yet friendly rivalry, there are a number of other experienced teams coming to France that will no doubt keep the level of competition quite high.
The World Sport Kite Championships page on Facebook has indicated that they will be posting some scores, highlights and possibly video from the event on a daily basis as it happens… We can’t wait to hear all about it!
Official WSKC site – http://www.worldsportkite.com
Stay tuned to Kitelife
We’ll be doing our best to keep everyone informed as we bring projects to completion and announce new ones… While we try to send out email updates periodically, the most regular stream of info from Kitelife can be found on our own Facebook page, located at the URL below.
http://www.facebook.com/kitelife
Thanks everyone for reading, see you in the skies somewhere!
John and Takako Barresi
